In Going Stealth Toby Beauchamp demonstrates how the enforcement of gender conformity is linked to state surveillance practices that identify threats based on racial, gender, national, and ableist categories of difference. Positioning surveillance as central to our understanding of transgender politics, Beauchamp examines a range of issues, from bathroom bills and TSA screening practices to Chelsea Manning's trial, to show how security practices extend into the everyday aspects of our gendered lives. He brings the fields of disability, science and technology, and surveillance studies into conversation with transgender studies to show how the scrutinizing of gender nonconformity is motivated less by explicit transgender identities than by the perceived threat that gender nonconformity poses to the U.S. racial and security state. Beauchamp uses instances of gender surveillance to demonstrate how disciplinary power attempts to produce conformist citizens and regulate difference through discourses of security. At the same time, he contends that greater visibility and recognition for gender nonconformity, while sometimes beneficial, might actually enable the surveillance state to more effectively track, measure, and control trans bodies and identities.

Praise

“This innovative book is an important contribution to both trans studies and surveillance studies—particularly to analyses of the War on Terror, border enforcement, and identity documentation. Toby Beauchamp convincingly weaves together arguments about surveillance, migration, and trans embodiment. Making several critical interventions in trans studies and trans advocacy, this book addresses the ways that whiteness and immigration status are often assumed characteristics of trans subjecthood.” — Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

“Going Stealth is a brilliant intervention in the field of transgender studies and beyond, by way of its critique of the violent capacities of the surveillance state. From the identification document as an administrative practice to the airport and the public bathroom as sites where the anxieties of the state around certain bodies and bodily technologies play out, Toby Beauchamp traces a complex account of militarism, monitoring, and refusals. This book is essential reading for those who seek to understand and critique how surveillance arranges our lives.” — Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness